Champagne—as in the French wine region—is distraught. “A legal loophole allows some U.S. wines to masquerade as ‘Champagne’,” their new ad campaign cries, asking you, noble lover of justice, to join their quest to protect their name. I feel their pain, but I can’t imagine this causing outraged constituents to flood the halls of Congress. (And the ad’s cynical appeal to our jingoism—”Even names of American wine regions like Napa Valley are misused.”—is just depressing.)
One of the prices of mega-success is seeing your proper noun become a common one, like Xerox or Scotch Tape. My apologies to Scott, Marcal, and Puffs, but when I’m looking to blow my nose, as far as I know I’m reaching for a Kleenex.
But the ad did get me thinking about the correct names for things, and so now I feel like it’s time for me to air my grievances about sliders.
I don’t know how this happened, but at some point every faddish restaurant, bar and “lounge” felt like they needed to sell you stupid, overcooked mini hamburgers for twice what you should be paying for a decent, regular-sized hamburger.
But that’s not why I object to the mini-burger fad. I object to it because everyone calls them “sliders.”
Sliders come from White Castle. Period. They’re called that because they’re cooked over a steaming pile of onions, and the greasy sweat makes the burger slide down your throat. They’re sort of amazing, if only because you can eat them and not be able to tell if they’re awesome or vile. (How you feel about them an hour later is what determines where you stand on them.) The word originated with White Castle fans, and the company eventually copyrighted the name, spelling it “Slyder,” which somehow manages to make it even grosser.
I remember my first encounter with the WC. Despite the veritable buffet of fast food chains available in my suburban New Jersey youth, I never once made it to a White Castle. I don’t recall seeing many of them, but maybe it was just that my parents—even though they counted the Big Breakfast at McDonalds as a weekend highlight—knew better than to take us to the Castle.
But anything denied eventually becomes irresistible. So, one night when I was in college, while on my way to a cheesy club in Ypsilanti, Michigan, called The Edge, I spied a White Castle and impulsively pulled in. My vegetarian friend Thomas went first, and the drive-thru speaker said something I’d never heard before: “Would you like a bacon cheeseburger with those fries?” I should have known to be careful of anything sold by the Sack, but I got a Sack of 10 Slyders. A Sack of Slyders. Listen to the sound of that! It’s the poetry of the grotesque.
I ate them as I drove, one hand on the wheel. As we got closer to the club, I started really gulping them down, and the pliant little burgers complied. I got to the bouncer and quietly burped up some steamy onion breath. No women talked to me that night, which is also why all these trendy places have to stop calling their precious little burgers sliders. A true slider is not a sexy thing.
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